Coinbase Removes XRP, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic Over ‘Low Usage’
Crypto Winter, the FTX debacle and increased regulatory scrutiny have caused some crypto companies like Coinbase to cut back on cryptocurrency offerings.
The largest US-based crypto exchange said on Tuesday that it will remove XRP, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic from its crypto wallet, cutting back on a group of digital coins that once held sway.
Coinbase said the cryptocurrencies will no longer be supported on the Coinbase Wallet starting in January “due to low usage,” but users can still withdraw any unsupported assets using their wallet recovery phrase.
Once a top token, XRP, the original cryptocurrency of the blockchain-based digital payment network Ripple, has faced a number of controversies over the past couple of years. In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs Inc. and its founders, alleging that they had misled investors and personally profited from an unregistered security.
The token remains the seventh-largest cryptocurrency in the world, with a market capitalization of $20 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, although the cumulative market capitalization of the crypto sector has fallen from more than $2 trillion to around $850 billion in recent months. .
The other two cryptocurrencies Coinbase is dropping, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic, both came about because of “hard forks” — when a blockchain splits in two — as a result of disagreements over the future of each.
In 2016, developers forked the Ethereum blockchain and created the Ethereum Classic token. After a hacker stole millions from The DAO, a decentralized organization with its own popular Ethereum-based token, a majority of developers voted to split the network to restore the funds to the victims. The native token of the new network is Ether, the second largest by market capitalization, while the token for the old Ethereum blockchain was known as Ethereum Classic, now the 23rd largest, according to CoinMarketCap.
A year after the Ethereum fork, Bitcoin Cash was produced when the developers of the Bitcoin blockchain disagreed about how the network should work. Some created their own blockchain and a new native cryptocurrency with the aim of facilitating faster payments than the original Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is the 27th largest crypto by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.
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